We Disappear

  Moynihan’s was the only place that sold it. Made somewhere in Missouri, packaged in those vintage red-white wrappers, Cherry Mash was their little luxury. It was a miniature brown boulder of chocolate and pebbled peanut, filled with a maraschino goo that matched the color of, and quickly melted on, their two wet tongues.

  And so, a stealing contest. They chose a morning in late August. They watched the revolving glass doors slowly turning, catching the summer sun, causing the rush of Moynihan’s shoppers to appear, in that light, like astonished carousel horses. At the precise moment, my mother and Dan went slinking through. They waited to assure they wouldn’t get caught, then began cramming their pockets with candy. Both equally desperate to win the contest; both eager for the sweet-cherry triumph.

  My mother managed to steal nine, and then, with a final swipe, ten. She was sure she’d stolen more than her brother. She began striding toward the revolving doors—Dan thrilled and trembling behind her—when a man swooped to stop them.

  The man was one of Moynihan’s security guards. He forced them to return the Cherry Mashes; he left them waiting in a padlocked basement room. She would never forget his harelip or peeling sunburned skin, his silver badge or midnight-colored jacket. His fingernails ridging four red arcs on her arm.

  Dan accurately predicted what would happen next. Ten minutes after the guard’s telephone call, their father arrived at the store, grinning through gritted teeth, one fist drumming at his side. “Back we go,” he said, almost singing, a voice he rarely used.

  At home, as with previous punishments, their father stood above them, a silencing hand on each head. He ordered them outside, past the backyard, to the ivy-curtained woods beyond. From the lanes of gaunt trees, they were to choose a single “switch”: the stick that would deliver their beatings.

  By that point in their lives, they knew all about switches. The larger limbs, knobbed and bulky, left dull, brown bruises and a lingering ache in the bones. The smaller switches brought different pain entirely: a rabbit-shriek pain; a tiny, hot-pepper pain. My mother and Dan could never decide which pain was more bearable.

  But that evening, they agreed they’d been punished enough. A silent, conspiratorial nod confirmed what they would do. Together they entered the woods, searching the clearings and bushes and trees for the perfect place to hide. They vowed to leave home and never return.

  As they waited, the sun descended heavy in the west, bleeding at the horizon until it was gone. The wind grew cold. Eventually their stomachs were grumbling, and Dan tried making her laugh (Know what would be real good right now? A Cherry Mash!). They heard the scuffling of skunks; a single horned owl. Yet they stayed in the woods that entire night, sitting against opposite sides of an oak, hugging their knees against their chests.

  By morning they had realized they couldn’t simply disappear. Escape was never that easy. They waited until breakfast to sneak back home. Maybe their father had given up. Maybe he was ready to forgive.

  As a boy, I always wished my mother’s story had ended this way. Two children, a ten-hour night in the chilly woods, no water or dinner or blanketed beds. Why hadn’t the father seen the damage? Why hadn’t he only lectured them longer, or suggested simple notes of apology? Dear Sirs at Moynihan’s Department Store… This is what I wished. Sometimes I wished further, devising scenarios with the cheeriest outcomes: perhaps he’d taken them back to the store and instead bought them clothes and marshmallow sundaes and school supplies; or perhaps they’d tromped through the woods, through the backyard, and into the house, only to find their bunk beds filled, pillow to baseboard, with mountains of Cherry Mash, their favorite, their forgiveness.

  But their father had done none of these. That morning, the sister and brother stepped into their house, the curtains flaring with air, the hardwood floors bright with sun. They found him waiting sleeplessly in his rocking chair. He held a long, thick switch in his left hand. A narrow switch in his right. Dan went first, and Donna second. They kneeled before him as always, clenching jaws and holding breaths, taking both the dull lingering pain and then the sweet pinprick pain. The big switch across their arms and bottoms and legs, enduring it for him, then the small switch across their arms and bottoms and legs, again and again, enduring it for the father.

  For the second consecutive night, the sleeping pills lasted half their promised length. I woke at three a.m. with her old story in my head. If my mother’s account of her disappearance was true, then how could her father, with all his penances and commands, stay so callous? Why hadn’t the loss of his little girl made him mellow or especially vigilant? My mother’s stories just didn’t connect. Gradually I’d come to doubt their dilemmas and skim, perfunctory resolutions. Perhaps not only her disappearance was false, but also the story of the theft and resulting punishment.

  Yet I also understood how deeply it would pain my mother to lie to Alice or me. It wasn’t typical of her to simply invent these stories, whether then or now. Were the stories indeed a result of her illness? Did she even grasp the actual truth in the stories she told? These questions sharpened in my head, and soon, in my worry, I carried the little black bag to the bathroom. To avoid the mirror, I opened the medicine cabinet: John’s Brut and Old Spice colognes; his toenail clippers and tweezers; his white and whittled styptic pencil. I crushed two lines of meth on the soapstone sink basin, sniffing to quell the headache, to ensure I’d be fully alert.

  I went to check on my mother. Both of us had slept throughout the day, and we hadn’t spoken since returning from our interview. In the living room I found her sleeping still, but there was evidence she’d woken earlier in the night. Surprisingly, she’d shut the television off. She’d lit the canvas tongue of a kerosene lamp, its white flame trembling shadows through the room. In a corner were the chocolate bars, neatly stacked into a white-and-red pyramid. Propped against them, conspicuous enough so I could see, was a single photograph.

  I moved closer, squinting in the wobbly lamplight. It wasn’t the stolen picture of Lacey, but instead a picture of myself at seventeen. I was wearing a stiff-necked shirt, my hair dyed from its usual strawberry blond to a preposterously bright red. I had silver hoops through my ears and, at the right temple, a dime-size dye stain. “How embarrassing,” I whispered to the room.

  It was my mother, I recalled, who had focused and snapped the picture. She’d been nothing like Grandfather Wyler. She hadn’t objected to my daydreamy posing, to my earrings or rubber bracelets. She hadn’t, years later, torn the picture in half or buried it secretly away.

  I knelt and watched her sleep. The shadows darkened the creases in her face. She’d lost nearly all the lashes on her eyes, but the lids were beautiful, two violet petals. Around us, the air smelled of smoke and of her sickness: both the root and its result. I removed the crowning Cherry Mash bar from the little pyramid, and then I placed it beside her on the couch, its wrapper brushing the loose fabric of her robe.

  In the kitchen, she’d been adding to her gallery of the missing. She’d stuck them to the refrigerator with vegetable magnets; she’d tacked them to the walls beside the cabinets and sink, next to her modern telephone that worked, and her antique Western Electric crank-handle that didn’t. Ann-Elise Bridges. Catherine Custer. Vincent Grimes. Yesterday, she’d said she wanted me to learn their names. I’d promised I would.

  I pinned my own photo among the gallery above the sink. I stepped back to regard it: the youthful face, the pale and skinny seventeen-year-old boy, now joined with the rest of the disappeared.

  From somewhere outside, a noise broke the silence. A sudden, fleshy thump, not from the back porch but from the front of the house.

  I leaned over the sink, straining to see through the window. A dark shape was moving across my mother’s front porch. It was not Dolores or anyone familiar; from the height and broad shoulders, I could tell it was a man. His back was turned from the door, but I could see his busy motions, his arms in an orderly jerk as though playing invisible drums. I hurried for
the door. The meth made me shaky but brave, and I twisted the knob, quiet so my mother wouldn’t wake.

  At the creak of the door, the man vaulted from the porch and went sprinting into the night. His footfalls were surprisingly fast, then faster, a violence of echoes along the street, the towering lamps and trees, the drab and slumbering homes. He sprinted and didn’t look back. He moved like an animal, ghostlike and small and secretly fleeing. I stepped back against the door. In the dark distance I saw one last flash—the animal flail of his arm as he ran—and then his shadow dissolved into black.

  Everything had happened so fast. I hadn’t seen his face, hadn’t pinpointed a brand of shoes or color of shirt. But when I looked down, I saw what he’d done. The porch was decorated with more candy bars, the red-and-white wrappers now ordered into shapes, stunted pyramids like the one my mother had made. One stack to the left of the door; another to the right. The shapes seemed to hold some concealed meaning, some secret I couldn’t know.

  This time I didn’t collect the candy for her. Instead I toppled the pyramids with two bitter kicks. I opened the door and went back inside. The room’s darkness stopped me, and I waited as the outlines steadily sharpened.

  I heard her breathing before I could actually see. She had sat up on the couch, the afghan bunched in her lap. Although her eyes were locked on me, she didn’t seem awake at all. I heard her laugh—an eerie, complicated glee that sounded nothing like my mother. The purple beads glittered darkly on her robe. She was eating the Cherry Mash, smearing chocolate on her lips and chin. As I watched, she took the final bite. She fell back on her pillow, returning to her deep, unknowable sleep.

  FOUR

  AFTER MR. WYLER and the stranger on our porch, I spent the first week waiting for some further event, staring from the windows at the vacant street, bolting upright in bed at any noise. But the days were ash-gray and routine. I began to wonder which parts were real, which had sprung from dreams or drugs. When I caught my mother stashing the candy bars in the basement storage room, she claimed she didn’t know the stranger’s identity. In fact, she said, she hardly remembered waking that night at all.

  We settled awkwardly into autumn. We bought a pumpkin, carved it, but burned our attempt at a pie. We bought chocolate cats and witches for trick-or-treaters we hoped wouldn’t come. Twice we debated informing Alice of my return home. “Let’s wait and call next week,” my mother offered. I knew she didn’t want Alice to learn the depth of her sickness. I had more selfish reasons for keeping silent: this was our time, together, just my mother and me.

  As expected, the meth made me restless. New York had provided ways to channel this energy, but the Kansas towns offered nothing. I’d lost touch with my few high-school friends. I’d forgotten to bring books or music, and I couldn’t summon the patience for my mother’s outdated computer. So I let her con me into afternoons with the faulty television—Antiques Roadshow, Cold Case Files, Investigative Reports. She’d take one end of the couch, and I’d take the other. Without speaking, she’d lift her feet into my lap, and I’d warm them with my hands.

  Often she was frail and hardly moved at all. But sometimes she didn’t seem so sick. Then I could almost forget her disease, almost forget all disease, and these days she insisted we drive.

  She called the drives our “missions.” We went to an abandoned Pratt County fairground where the body of a John Doe, or so she’d read, had once been found; to the newly renovated house where, once upon a tragic time, the Carnabys had lived. Throughout the missions, I kept remembering our awkward argument: I’m not quite ready to tell you the rest. The time has to be right…the surprise.

  Along the narrow avenues were houses with shattered windows, with gardens of car parts and sandburs and tumbleweeds. I watched her scribble street names on her notepads, names that might have once been functional but now were simply silly: Cowherder Street, Barley Boulevard, God’s Green Way. We often ate in the Ford, taking the cheapest, quickest meals as we drove. We swung through random grocery aisles, post offices, Laundromats, and she’d casually ask whether anyone knew a missing person, a family member, a friend. She never had any luck. “There’s always tomorrow” became her proverb.

  On our missions, we acted like chummy children. Sometimes she behaved as though a younger, healthier self was trembling inside her, just beyond the skin, incapable of piercing through. We played road-sign and license-plate games. One cloud would be mine, and another hers; I’d see “a polar bear with a beard,” and she “something exploding.” One day we even invented nicknames. She wasn’t feeling well, and once again I’d started that morning with a head full of meth. So she became “Tired.” I was “Wired.” I remember her thinking these names equally cruel and hilarious, and I remember her laughing, a gorgeous, percussive laugh from the top of her heart. I wanted never to forget that laugh.

  On our first mission, we saw a troupe of hunters carrying a freshly killed deer. On our second, we passed an empty school bus with a bright blue sign in its back window: THIS VEHICLE WAS CHECKED FOR SLEEPING CHILDREN. “Oh, I like that,” said my mother. “I think that’s wonderful.”

  Fridays were reserved for Dr. Kaufman. The first two weeks I was high, and in my jumpy, meth-fueled paranoia I avoided meeting him, certain he’d sense it festering inside me. I vowed I’d wait until later that fall. I’d drive my mother to the office, help her to the doors, then walk back to the truck to read (her Antique Homes or Country Collectibles magazines; cartoon-illustrated addiction brochures from the lobby) until again I saw her, waving, through the glass.

  Letters arrived, about a dozen per week. Most were addressed from Kansas; others came two or three times removed, families of Kansans who’d seen my mother’s ads and wondered if she could offer some form of closure. Photographs fluttered from the pastel, finically folded stationeries, and my mother taped or tacked them to the kitchen walls. She got a letter from the wife of a missing Tulsa policeman. Another from the parents of a boy last seen near Kanopolis Lake, where I’d sometimes gone swimming when I was young. And another from a Montana mother, who’d included a videotape of her son’s Christmas operetta; her scruff-haired wolverine of a boy barking the chorus of a song, Shining star to lead us home, lead us home, only days before he’d disappeared.

  She even received a picture of a dead child. A parent from Topeka had sent it. The photo showed a blond-haired girl in her coffin, a satiny white dress, white roses at her chest. Her angel’s face seemed frozen in pain, as though some horrible hand had bloodlessly plucked both wings from her back. From the accompanying letter, my mother learned that the girl hadn’t gone missing but had died in a playground accident. “We could never use this,” she said. “Even if we were writing a book.” Holding the photo, merely looking at it, left me dizzy with remorse. She hid it in a kitchen cupboard instead of pinning it to the wall, and we didn’t speak of it again.

  The nights got longer and blacker but I couldn’t sleep through any of them. Sometimes I’d rise from the spring-creaking bed, ease my feet into her fuzzy pink slippers, and wander the dark rooms. On the couch, she remained sleeping with a calm courtliness. I’d check the drawers and closets and corners, an aimless zombie with my headache and itchy eyes, searching for no particular thing. Maybe I thought I’d discover some secret. Maybe, in my insomniac daze, these searches were all I could think to do.

  One night I woke at the onset of a lightning storm. I could have swallowed another sleeping pill, but instead went for her slippers again, deciding this time to rummage around her basement. As I descended, I could see all the clutter she’d collected over the years. After John had died, my mother had taken up odd hobbies, and at the bottom of the stairs was the evidence: her arrangements of dried roses; her assembly of stuffed-stocking rabbits and milkmaid dolls with X-X eyes; three cracked, repainted carousel horses she’d found at an estate sale.

  I pulled the string on a dangling lightbulb and moved farther into the room. In one corner were the washer and dryer, the piles of un
washed clothes. In another were networks of copper pipes and stacks of bricks, half-crumbled to powdery stains. The late October rains had leaked through the walls, leaving a wormy smell and puddles that oozed iodine-black on the bare cement floor.

  Separate from the rest of the basement, along the south wall and below the stairs, was my mother’s cramped storeroom. Inside, she kept shoeboxes filled with insurance papers and hospital bills; John’s tackle boxes and hunting gear; the clumped green boughs and artificial needles of her dismantled yearly Christmas tree. Although she often locked the storeroom’s narrow black door, tonight it had been left open slightly. I pushed the door with my foot and went inside.

  In the center of the room, she’d assembled a small, rickety cot. Stacked on top were a freshly laundered blanket, a sheet and pillowcase, a fat feather pillow. The box of candy bars rested alongside; even without counting, I could tell she’d eaten nearly half of them.

  Three warped pine shelves were mounted on the wall above the cot. On the middle shelf, beside the artificial tree, was another, larger box: oblong like a hatbox, with yellow and black stripes. Moynihan’s, said the cursive imprint on the lid. The Hutchinson department store from my mother’s girlhood story. The store I knew had closed nearly twenty years ago.

  I lifted the box from the shelf, sitting on the cot to remove the lid. The storeroom had no windows, and its overhead light was weak, but I could still distinguish the contents. The box held a ragged foldout map of Kansas. Beneath the map were two leather binders, both unfamiliar to me, one in dusty brown, the other a faded tan. Both binders were covered with antique collectible decals, souvenirs from attractions my mother had never visited: Old Faithful; the Grand Canyon; the Alamo.

  I brought the darker-colored binder into my lap and opened it. As I’d expected, inside was a small bundle of newspaper photographs with one-column clippings. MISSING. Each photo showed a different little girl.